Abstract.Four states have disappeared as a result of the collapse of communism and many others have come into being. I want to look at the reason why these states have disappeared, what this says about the nature of state‐sustaining ideologies and what the disappearance tells us about the relationship between statehood and nationhood. I will also look at the effectiveness of communism as a state‐sustaining ideology. The four are, obviously, the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia and East Germany. In each case, the survival of the state was linked to communism and the end of communism brought their continued existence into jeopardy. I shall not be looking at the Soviet Union in detail.Broadly, the construction of political identities can come about in two ways – by ethnicity or by the state. Each gives rise to a different set of loyalties, creates its own panoply of rituals etc. When the two coincide, the mythical nation‐state can be said to be in being, but this hardly exists in reality (Iceland may be the sole exception in